We've got some Numark M20 self-powered speakers that I think are usually used as DJ monitors. We bought them for when we're screening films, so they've got enough oomph for a moderate sized audience, but they are also fairly compact (about the size of bookshelf speakers) and fuss free. When they are off duty, they have an ipod plugged into them in the kitchen.

They are by a glasgow based group of of artists who go by the name of Henry VIII's Wives. One of whom is in this years Turner Prize. (I can't remember that last time there was Turner shortlist without a Glasgow artist)

The pictures were made and exhibited about 10 years ago, so I can see how the Record considers that to be 'news'.

I'm told there's a strong link between caravanning and swinging.

Margaret Beckett!

I think its the caravanning thats more likely to lead to these relationship breakups than the swinging. I reckon someone should offer quicky Vegas style drive-through devorces, where the unhappy couple try to negotiate the drive-through with a caravan whilst arguing over a map.

If you're that curious get down to a swingers club and do it yourself!

Make sure it is a swingers club before you start to 'do it yourself'.

Similar to the joke about the embarrassment of being caught **** by your mum (ie. not expecting her to wake up)

Lasted about 6 months

Who are you? Sting?

A horse walks onto a bar and the barman says "Why the long face"

And the horse says "How dare you, I've come here to spend my hard earned money and before I can even open my mouth you dive in with some cruel dig at my personal appearance"

The barman says, "Sorry, its force of habit, I was reading the joke above and, you know, sort of got carried away. I can't apologise enough. Lets say we start over again"

So the horse walks out, and comes back in again and the barman says "Why the lon…. erm. Good evening and welcome to our fine establishment, my name's Biker Bruce and I'll be your barman and host for the evening, may I ask who you might be?"

And the horse says "I'm Sarah Jessica Parker"

Your bad day isn't getting any better is it.

My favorite joke of Clement Freud's goes:

An old woman in a care home gets talking to an old guy. He says – "Guess how old I am".

The old woman unzips his pants, delves her hand in and has a really good rummage around then says "You're 92"

He says "That amazing, how did you work that out?"

And she says "You told me yesterday"

There was a problem with one of CRCs flash adds a while back that was making them much more processor hungry than they needed to be, and on being notfied they replaced them with ads that looked identical but were beter behaved and i'm wondering whether its the same issue with the current ones. I think the culprit had animated parallaxing snowflakes. The parallaxing text on the current add is stuttering for me just now

The adds pay for the site and I have absolutely no problem with that, but they shouldn't compromise the site, thats counterproductive for everyone.

My lappy is crawling with the site as it is just now to the extent that typing this is pretty laboured, and battery life is minimal. My thighs are nice and warm though. With the ad I had to complain about you could actually hear whether its was on the screen or not.

At their birth of their new baby son, following all the usual checks are made by the doctor and midwife, the new parents are informed that their child is perfect and healthy in every way. Although for some reason it seems the baby is German.

The parents are taken aback a little, and explain how they are not german, or of german decent. They've never been to germany, and don't even think they've ever actually met anyone german. But the doctor has to assure them that while it really us quite unusual, there is nothing actually wrong with the child, or with being german. It'll be fine

Months and years pass and the child is obviously healthy and delightful, but the parents begin to worry that the child is a bit late in developing speech. At first it seems that maybe he's a late developer, but as time passes numerous tests are carried out and there is no physiological reason for the child not to speak. But the child doesn't speak.

In time the parents become resigned to the german child's mute, but otherwise happy existence.

Years pass and on the child's 16th birthday his mother brings him a bowl of soup while he silently watches television. As she return's to the kitchen the german teenager calls after her

"Mother, this soup is tepid"

His mother is totally taken aback.

"Son, you can speak. all this time we've been so worried, why have you waited til today to say anything to us? To anyone?"

Her son replies

"Up until now everything has been satisfactory"

but when I was a lad

So following transformation are you now a lady?

Armando Iannucci said the same about the invention piano. For all its technical and expressive advances over the harpsichord and clavichord, within weeks people were just using it for online gambling and downloading porn.

I get the same thing using my vodafone mobile dongle thing on my laptop. Its not specific to iPhones, or to phones, or to 02.

Nothing sneaky about it really, I think its just making mobile internet feasible.

Mind you I'm also sure I've seen the same thing with slow dialup connections. It might be the case that the website you are viewing is serving up images to suit your connection speed and it has nothing to do with the ISP. I generally find that thumbnails will be more compressed, but the images you click through to are not

Dumbiedykes in Edinburgh. There are a number of small hamlets in the Northwest that go by the name of "Bottoms". Not long after I passed my driving test it was my ambition to try and visit them all in one day.

Threadneedle St, home of the Bank of England, used to be called Gropecunt Lane. If your home town has a Love St or Lovers Lane, chances are that it was once called Gropecunt too.

I had one as an emergency replacement after drowning a phone. They look and feel lovely, and are surprisingly robust for something that looks a bit slim and glam. But the interface is very primative and fussy and seems to require twice as many button presses to achieve anything. The thing that drove me bloody nuts though was the red/green yes/no buttons being back to front.

Drove me up the fricking wall!

Falling into a black hole which crushes you to a near-singularity, so that you have to be buried in an incredibly tiny coffin that still takes six struggling pallbearers to lift

Lets all start a measles epidemic.

Define a high dose

Why would you want deodorant without aluminium in it?

What was the nature of the favour? Is there something broadly similar you can do in return?

If not a 'thing' how about tickets to an event, or something like theatre / restaurant vouchers. That way you don't have to second guess his tastes but he can have a night out that he can attribute to you. Theatre tokens are only worth giving if your local theatres actually accept them, and put on a wide enough range of shows – comedy, music and general entertainment as well as drama.

Burning wood is not a sensible option for transport or large machinery. For the relatively small-scale,

but I love to see the old war time woodgas powered buses back in action again – theres a heath robinson project for you to tinker with.

The original fuel crisis was the the shortage of wood for fuel – its the crisis that drove the technology to mine for fossil fuel in the first place. People like to use the word 'sustainable' for wood, but there is no way that wood could be sustained as a serious fuel choice.

I sometimes do create a ton or so of little timber off cuts – so I like to chuck them on the fire and put my feet up, but I'm not sure I could bring myself to buy wood just to burn it. It seems too useful.

If economy is the issue then both cars are high spec/high cost cars, in terms of servicing, repairs and consumables for what is a pretty low milage application.

Given than you aren't clocking up many miles, do the sums and see what the real difference would be fuel wise, on a week by week basis – would you notice/feel the difference?

EDIT
To which I would add…. with used cars, the best car is the one you know.

I exhibited Ramage's Unplugger and Jelly Wobbler a few years back, they were great. His workshop is a riot too.

I once doctored a fruit machine, switching all the fruit images for random bits of verbiage from Brian Sewell. The phrases were chosen so that they worked in any combination, so it could deliver 9,999 randomised verbose snide comments. It paid out if it came up with a dismissive critique he's made about a turner prize nominee.

My girlfriend's dad went cycle touring in France in the 50s, arrived in a town thinking there was some sort of local carnival going on and inadvertently crossed the finish line of a TDF stage moments before the winner.

The other thing to note is that a fuel cell is only more efficient than a IC engine if you are mixing the Hydrogen with Oxygen. But if you are mixing it with Air then the efficiency falls back in line with IC (before you factor in the comparative efficiencies of producing and transporting the respective fuels). Their efficiency falls as the load on the cell increases too. So to get that increased benefit you need to be producing/transporting/ bottling Hydrogen and Oxygen and being careful not to mix them up on the way. Eau the Humanity

I'm not sure what effort and energy goes into the commercial production of oxygen, but it costs me a few bob when I buy it, so I'd guess quite a lot

Fuel Cells are really old technology, as in early 1800s old. I think if they were ever going to find a real commercial application they would have done so by now.

FS is nearly as old as bicycles, the transport museum in glasgow has a nice example

edit: that site's not liking hotlinks

try

http://www.crazyguyonabike.com/pics/docs/00/00/13/74/large/cooper.jpg?v=1Y

edit again: now it likes them again

In the absence of Hell, lets settle for Hull.

I believe news journalists should be buried upright.

If you could brave the transport cafe ambience, the atmosphere of vague threat and the barmaids with cleft earlobes from having their earrings torn out…. then you could get a pint of mild for 65p in St Helens on 1989, but if you'd rather not have that pint infused by the adrenaline of you fight of flight reflexes then you'd expect to pay nearer a quid anywhere else in town.

I remember me and a friend finding a £20 note on the doorstep of a pub as we were racing in to catch last orders, 20 minutes later we practically had to be stretchered out.

One problem you'll find with local authorities is its actually quite difficult for them to work with volunteers, its problematic to have volunteers doing work that staff might feel they should be getting paid for – it sounds a bit daft but its the case non the less. When I work for an LA we'd get students wanting to do work experience with us, but we could only really give them work that didn't really need doing, because we couldn't displace work from paid staff, so unless someone has actually devised a scheme and is openly asking for volunteers/participants then you'll find it a struggle.

By the same measure even smaller organisations can find it difficult to work with volunteers, as at least in the first place you'll require a lot of supervision, and there isn't going to be anyone who can step away from their own work to devise work for you and oversee it.

You'd be better trying to identify one off / large scale events that require a lot of participants, rather than trying to get involved in the day to day.

Category Documentary

oh really, I find that statement less credible than any of Derrick Accora's ham camp.

It wasn't until after I watched the friday show that I realised that he told everyone how it would be done before he did it: He said at the very start of the show that there were two cameras in the room. We only seem to see the illusion through one camera. But he said there are two.

We (the TV viewers) weren't the ones participating in the illusion, the wednesday show was just a regular bit of tv trickery, nothing special about it, you get far more convincing TV illusions in an episode of Gordon Ramsey's Kitchen Nightmares – convincing in the sense that nobody would even perceive of them as illusions.

It was the 24 people who were wholey convinced that they predicted the lottery numbers who were the ones that were experiencing an illusion, not the TV viewers. The lottery results going out on live TV were part of the illusion being presented to them.

In terms of sale value – according to the news this morning – Second hand car dealers can't get hold of enough cars to sell – my GF just bought a car from a dealer that only had 5 cars on the forecourt. You might find the right dealer will be more interested, and pay more, than you'd imagine.

Its not a shortage thats reflected in private car sale values(yet)

I think in some business sectors, people seem to create a survival situation for their whole sector, so when one starts to play dirty they all have to.

Carfone Warehouse and their free broadband is an initiative (giving something away that people would pay for) where they stand to loose many millions, for years, before they can hope to claw any of it back. To compete, other providers have to put themselves into a similar harmful position and it becomes a game of who can hurt themselves the most. You keep on hurting til there is nobody else left, then charge what you want.

If you used to take free buses, handing out free coffee in Glasgow years ago, you'll perhaps have noticed that the same bus company is now runs all the most commercial routes, and is now also the most expensive.

Fairness, probably isn't the word, I'm not defending them at all. But presuming the Pheonix 4 and their 5th executive shared the £42m, over 5 years, then a year of any of their takings would have kept the doors open at Longbridge for 2 days.

You can make a big number like £42m if you add together 5 peoples incomes, over 5 years, and maybe forget about tax and other deductions, and add their predicted accumulated pensions, and then…. and then…

It was their company, and in fairness they were free to do whatever they wanted with it (within the law). And £42m is probably of no consequence in the scale of Rovers problems, probably the difference between being laid of on a tuesday or a wednesday.

I also have an idea of how to stop her talking, but it involves a one way visit to the vets. (To confront her fears, obviously).

What an invention – the savory coke float – swapping the coke for beer and the ice cream for mushy peas.

Genius

I think I felt myself evolve slightly just looking at the picture

You see, I thought she'd said "Pardon"

because..

pphhhhh

oh forget it.